Government & Spectrum regulators

When regulators need help to keep the nation’s networks running and under control, they turn to ATDI.

ATDI has the software tools and the consultancy expertise that regulators trust.

Overview:

Regulators have the unenviable task of managing the nations’ spectrum under the scrutiny of the public and governments. Pressure from all stakeholders demands that the country gains maximum benefit – financial and practical – from the scarce spectrum resources available. This means regulators must gain the highest prices at auctions and ensuring services are delivered at the lowest cost.

ATDI works with regulators across the world to provide them with problem-solving know-how. Every regulator faces a different set of issues and a constantly-shifting political and economic climate and ATDI finds bespoke answers to all the problems they face.

Regulators need to embrace and understand their markets both now and into the future and ATDI enables them to formalise their spectrum management processes with systems that can adapt and grow according to needs; only a flexible system can meet and exceed the known and as-yet-unstated demands that will be placed on it.

Case: Controlling data and putting it to work

Challenge

Regulators need to know the location, purpose and power of each base station across the country. In addition, it’s essential that regulators publish information for public scrutiny and comment. ATD was tasked to find a way of collating data from the competing companies using the spectrum, to establish how to integrate that information into the regulator’s existing systems and to present the figures as a workable database which could be accessed, searched and updated via the current spectrum management system.

Solution

ATDI engineers developed a process of importing external operator data into the database management system of ICS manager, which utilised the new Harmonised Computer Method (HCM). This process, on receipt of information about the base stations from operators,was able to import, access and amend data as required. This resulted in the database incorporating every tower and associated function across the country, enabling the regulator to ensure sufficient spectrum was available for radio communications services across the nation.

Case: Smoothing the path of radio auction

Challenge

An EU-regulator was preparing for an auction of spectrum of spectrum designated for LTE mobile networks. They asked ATDI to provide the planning and modelling to identify the potential of the ‘designated’ frequencies, areas where there may be issues and what strategies and mitigations were available to reduce or remove those issues. All parties were acutely conscious that in that mountainous country, the population was concentrated to a few cities and that the available frequencies were close to those used by television broadcasters; significant interference to either the television or LTE signals was not an option.

Solution

To reduce the interference between TV channels and LTE networks, several mitigation techniques were investigated in a sample area around the capital city. One of the most efficient mitigation techniques identified limited the interfering LTE base stations to only vertical polarisation; this is based on the fact that, with a few minor exceptions, the country’s digital television network is horizontally polarised.

ATDI also proposed that during the network design stage, LTE operators should consider the interference potential to the television networks and recommended mitigation techniques to overcome these effects, which included filtering. In addition, ATDI advocated a feasibility study to assess the re-assignment of spectrum in affected areas away from channels 58 to 60; this study also looked at the effect of not using channels in highly populated areas.